Tuff Love

Women body shaming themselves because society is telling them that they don’t fit it in with their size and shape has become a norm rather than the exception. But part of that society is telling that your reality is what and how you make it if you work around how you relate your body, this translates to how you make a relationship with your life. Start living in your body instead of your head. Mastering your reality starts when you start ripping off the one thing that you’re trying to fit in.

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Welcome to the sixth and final show of season two of Six Vulnerable Conversations Between Two Women. It’s such a beautiful series. Jamie and Arielle rocked it. This is on the concept of embodiment, transmission, and mastering your reality; an amazing show and an amazing series.

Listen to the podcast here:

Welcome to our final episode of Six Vulnerable Conversations Between Two Women where Jamie Elizabeth Thompson and I, two intimacy, desire and sex coaches, are going into the conversations that so many of us have on our minds, our hearts and in our bodies as we were walking through this world, yet we’re often not given a frame work or permission by society to talk about them. It’s been amazing. I can’t believe that we’re on our last episode together. I’m super excited because to me, this topic that we’re going to go into, embodiment, transmission, and becoming the master of your own reality and how to become an embodied expert, it’s what I’m committed to. It’s one of the things that Jamie and I are drawn towards. How do we fully inhabit our being so that we can craft and align a life in alignment with who we truly are and what our soul desires when we get all of that societal conditioning gunk out of our beings? Jamie, how are you feeling about this conversation?

I am excited because this is the piece that if it’s not there, everything else that we’ve been talking about might only live in conceptual land in the mind. This is about using our 3D manifestor, our vehicle in this reality, our body, to create the results, to manifest the desires, and to step into the reality that we are creating. This feels relevant to me in my own life and with everybody that I work with and see.

There’s extra pressure that we’re required to put on ourselves as coaches because if we’re doing this work in the world and we’re teaching it but we’re not embodying it, it feels fake. It smells false and there’s something off about it. One of the things that I judge the most is the feeling of someone being out of alignment. I’m so judgmental of it, especially within myself, so I’m excited to dive in here. This topic feels super relevant because the embodiment piece is what got me into this “work” in the first place, so I’m going to dive in.

In college, I did study psychology, but after college, I went the culinary school track. While I was in college, I was a waitress at this restaurant and absolutely fell in love with the restaurant environment and became a pastry chef. I see one of my old culinary school buddies is on the call with me, which makes me smile. In college, I also had a horrible relationship with my body. I was immediately confronted with the feeling of I needed to be attractive and hook up with guys and present myself in a certain way. I felt like my body and my “extra weight” made me unattractive, undesirable, and unworthy in a lot of ways.

I wound up yo-yoing back and forth between binge eating and chronic dieting, totally obsessed with a calorie counter, and totally checked out of my body. I remember getting to this breaking point when I was post-culinary school, I was working in a café eating all the pastries by day and coming home at night. I’m shaming myself for the foods that I had consumed during the day, constantly fixating on what I would be eating for my next meal, and simultaneously trying to fit myself into this size six pair of jeans that I’d fit to in my heyday in college. I remember getting to this place one night where I went from trying to fit myself into the jeans to literally trying to rip them to shreds and having that a-ha moment that they talk about where it’s like, “The very thing that I am trying to fit myself into is the thing that I want to rip apart.”

It had me take a hard look at what is important to me and like, “What the fuck am I doing?” The path that wound up taking me down was getting certified as an eating psychology coach where I started doing a lot of work around how we relate to our bodies and how that relates to how we relate to everything else in our life. Fast forwarding, the number one thing that I realized through that was that majority of human beings are pretty much checked out of their bodies and up in their head for one reason or another because our body isn’t good enough. We aren’t good enough, we are not making enough money, whatever the story is around why we don’t deserve to fully inhabit our body now. The problem is that if we’re not in here, if we’re not in our body and feeling and responding to what’s happening in the present moment, we wind up playing out usually the same negative or limiting stories over and over again. So much of my personal work and so much of the coaching work that I do with clients is looking at why are we not in the present moment responding to what is happening and why are we up here looking for the worst-case scenario to repeat itself.

It’s such a great illustration of the process of taking something that could be a concept and making it into something physical in reality through trying to rip through your jeans. That is one of the pieces that is missing so often in coaching or therapy or a lot of these modalities that can be very head-based. It’s taking the experience of what it is that we’re wanting to experience and finding a way to feel it in a tactile way in our body. I practice this all the time. I’m sitting there and I was like, “I am feeling like I want to be held right now.” It was this feeling that came over me and it was like, “This child part of me is feeling a little insecure. There’s some big things happening in my life and a part of me hasn’t caught up with it yet.” That used to trigger me when I’m not in a relationship or even if I am reaching out to a partner to receive that love.

I have a practice of giving it to myself first, whether I’m going to reach out to someone or not, but it was going in and finding and holding the physical parts of my body and experiencing holding myself. It was five minutes, it was a quick little practice, and I felt so full afterwards. It was this little tiny step of taking something from the mind into a physical experience is a very simple step, but it is so often missed. I had a client tell me that they were in therapy together for years and never had movement in this particular subject of this particular thing that was happening in the bedroom that had been bothering them. It wasn’t until we got into a scenario and acted it out and felt it and created an exercise of moving it from the land of the conceptual and talking about how everyone feels, talking about the story over and over again into something physical, that it moved. It shifted within a couple of sessions. This is not rocket science. It’s much simpler than textbooks would want us to have it believe because they want it to be this heavy complex thing that only professionals can understand. One thing I love about REO as well is you are saying that it’s not something complex that only professionals can understand, but rather it’s something we can all practice through bringing these concepts into a physical representation and a physical experience.

I’m so glad you brought up that example because when you were describing that feeling of this discomfort in our body that’s usually emotionally-based and there can be the resistance to being with that feeling because we’re told in culture that we shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about things and we’re supposed to be happy all the time. Where you might have reached out for a partner, for me, I would reach for ice cream. Looking at this parallel between these things that we can put into our bodies, so to speak, to nourish and soothe this, whether it’s through eating food or sexual pleasure or whatever it is, it’s being willing to stay present and in their bodies when in that moment, all we want to do is run.

Mastering Your Reality: When animals experience some type of traumatic scenario, the first thing that they do is shake out their body.

The other thing that came up was when you were saying, “Taking it from the mind and bringing it into the body.” Those were the way animals respond to trauma. When animals experience some type of traumatic scenario, the first thing that they do is shake out their body because in that moment where trauma can get calcified in the body, they know that the first thing to is move and get more fully in the body.

What you’re talking about, physical movement, it has completely changed my life. It is the one thing. In the middle of a day when I’m experiencing stress or something like that or I get tired, sometimes tiredness is a reaction I have when I don’t want to feel something, I’ll turn on some music and get in my body and dance out. Whatever is going on, whatever is happening, it takes five minutes. I’m a big fan of five-minute fixes, things that take a few minutes that can completely shift the trajectory of the rest of your day. It’s going into the experience and facing it. One of the things that you said is when animals experience trauma, they go into the experience of the trauma and move through it. They don’t run away from it.

This is a primary difference between animals and humans and why we get stuck in these mental loops is because instead of going into the physical body and shaking it out or moving through it in some way, we retreat from the body, which is where the problem will actually be solved into our mind, and start analyzing it. Then we end up creating a separation between the solution and where we are in our experience. So much of it is like a great question. “When there’s something happening that maybe isn’t desirable, what is it right now that I don’t want to feel?” Letting yourself go into that experience and letting yourself have it and holding yourself there, holding the part that doesn’t want to feel it with the higher self who sees and feels everything and has no issue whatsoever with it, and allowing those parts to merge instead of creating a more fractured psyche by going into the mind.

Someone can say, “If it was simple to do, then I would do it.” You’re talking about it like it’s so simple, and the thing is, it is simple. I’m constantly doing this work. It’s not like this work ever stops. It’s that we reach different levels. For me, especially over the past year as I’ve been doing my own growth and up leveling, I’ve gotten curious around why I might be attached to not getting over something. What has me angry at the idea of letting go of this thing that’s limiting me?

It’s the part of me that tells a story. I’ve been struggling with this for so long that if I can change it at the drop of the hat, then does it mean that that struggle wasn’t important? There’s something about wakening to the realization that we can swim in shame for our entire life and we feel like we’re defined by it. Someone could tell me, “Your shame doesn’t have to exist. You can take a step to the right and it doesn’t have to be there.” I remember this feeling, I can’t let it be that easy because then all of my struggles seem stupid. That’s been a big place of growth for me and it has been continually one of my edges, the places where I look at, the story that needs to continue to be hard because if it’s easy, that means that I was wasting my time for so long.

It is the idea that, “If I can shift this on my own, that it was my fault that it was here in the first place.” It brings up the part of us that almost wants to be a victim of the circumstance because then, we’re not at fault. The experience of taking responsibility for what has been so far, it gets collapsed with fault and responsibility, and faults are not the same thing. It doesn’t mean that it’s our fault that we’ve felt shame for our whole life. It means that in this moment, we are choosing to now be the creator and the power in our own life. It’s a cultural programming piece. When I was a little kid, I used to intentionally be disruptive. I would be disruptive in class, I would start a whole scene because I wanted to rebel against authority, and then I would pretend that I didn’t do it. Nobody knew where it originated because I was never the one that got in trouble.

I was the one that started it, but I remember having this loop going as a child that carried on into early adult life that was like, “Go start something,” and then slip out the back door and don’t be responsible for. I know I’ve done this in relationships. I have a way of poking and provoking people and getting them to react and starting a thing and then having it not be my fault, “I didn’t do it, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It’s this part that wants to not take responsibility for my own power. That has been a big part of my journey is in getting my impact that I have and seeing that as an opportunity to fully stand in my personal power such that now having an awareness of, “You’ve got triggered and checking, not from a place of fault, but interest.” Is there a part of me that wanted to hook them in with that? Is there a little part of me that’s being passive aggressive? Is there a little part of me that’s trying to get some reaction or has some agenda and looking at that as an honor and a place to stand that creates a position of standing in myself and sitting back in my seat?

When we feel a victim of our circumstances, when we feel like we don’t have control over what is happening to us that can often happen when more checked out of our bodies. This is a lot of where sexual assault occurs because when we’re being violated in any way, so often the response is to check out. Then we feel completely unable to use our physical body, let alone our voice, to advocate for us towards saying no, which is why this work of releasing shame for our sexuality and releasing shame for our bodies is so pivotal because they’re the door keepers to actually inhabiting our present moment experience and our ability to advocate for ourselves.

There is this terrifying transition, and this is where different genders have different condition challenges in our culture. I wouldn’t say this is just a woman’s problem, this is a human being’s problem. I would say that when women have spent so many decades feeling like their body was not their own and that the pleasure that they can cultivate in their body is for someone else, this can be a confronting and challenging transition from taking ownership that yes, we are responsible for everything that happens to us because of circumstances that occurred, before we could have a conscious awareness to change them and how can we take ownership and simultaneously not fall in to the shame of self-blame.

For me, the way that I’ve seen the self-blame show up is another sneaky way to not take responsibility. I see this happen with, with couples in coaching a lot as well, where it’s like someone will realize, “I hurt you, now I’m going to be a martyr and fall on my sword.” If we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s another sneaky way to not have to fully stand in responsibility. It’s hard. Here’s the thing about responsibility, the way that we’re speaking about it. I want to outline it a little bit. It’s a place to come from. It’s a perspective. There are many perspectives to have, so it’s a matter of choosing a perspective since we have that opportunity to make a conscious choice of what perspective we’re going to stand in. It’s a matter of choosing a perspective that is going to serve. For me in my life, responsibility serves. There’s always an action that I can take. There’s always something that I can do if I’m coming from responsibility.

It’s one of those things where there are so many different views out there and for some people, this gets into a sticky territory and I want to be mindful and responsible of that. If someone is victimized by someone else, that doesn’t mean that it’s their fault. It’s looking from the perspective of, “This is what happened. Now what? What can I do now? How can I empower myself in this moment? How can I empower myself in this moment, as a mantra, as way to live life?” Coming back to the subject of this podcast, this is a big part of my experience as being an embodied expert, which I don’t even love that word because I feel like we’re all stumbling around figuring this out and I happened to be empowered in that. This is one of the things that empowers me in the experience of life is standing from this perspective of responsibility.

This thought kept coming up and I was going to not do it because it’s charging, but I’m going to take full responsibility for it. I don’t know if you’ve seen the clip with the recent Tony Robbins experience where he made some type of comment about the Me Too Movement and a woman stood and was advocating for the power of the movement. It was this powerful experience of witnessing this woman. Simply witnessing a woman stand up in the face of what many would consider a guru and advocate for her opinion around the places where she felt like he was like case in point summarizing the Me Too Movement into something that’s disempowering for a lot of women, it was this very powerful experience.

Mastering Your Reality: The Me Too Movement serves as a way for women to find their voice.

On the one hand, you have the power of this woman standing up and being honest about why she felt he was boxing it into something. Simultaneously, I understand the perspective that he is coming from. The Me Too Movement serves as a way for women to find their voice and simultaneously it can also be a way for us to cling more tightly to the label of a victim and use it as a way to lash out. It’s a very challenging topic because we can put whatever spin we want on any story. It’s this question of, “Do I want to take responsibility for my experience and make new choices, or is there this attachment to staying where I am?” A big part of it is that we don’t know how to shift out of this thing that has dominated who we believe ourselves to be for so long.

I’ll also lean into this edge with you here because I do think that there’s something important here as a possible perspective that someone could choose to take on, and that is “Life is always happening for me.” That’s another perspective that serves me and asking the question of “I wonder what value is going to come out of the circumstance.” As a young girl, in childhood, I had some challenging circumstances that people are like, “Are you okay?” People would have this reaction to it as we do, which is completely natural, and people want to say, “I’m sorry.” My experience of it now, and this is after years and years of work with dealing with sexual trauma and dealing with my own pain and dealing with facing things that don’t necessarily make sense as a young child, dealing with that as an adult now, I’m grateful for the experience.

I feel like we’re truly over something and have fully gleaned the benefits of that experience when we can look back and take the lesson and not necessarily want to repeat, definitely don’t need to repeat it, but are able to look back and be like, “I’m actually grateful for that because it taught me this.” An excellent example of this is a TED Talk that was done by a man who raped a woman and the woman who was raped. They are now traveling the world together doing a TED Talk and teaching about coming back and completing the cycle of the victim-perpetrator loop that probably could’ve kept on going. We are victimized and then we want to point the finger and we want to say, “Fuck you. You did this to me and I hate you.” The rest of the world is like, “Yeah, you get to say that.” What’s next? That’s my question. Yes, that’s a stage. How can we move? Where I’m interested in working with people and with myself is how can we move from that stage of blame and projection and anger and feeling sorry for ourselves into true alchemy, and alchemizing the experience into something that is valuable, that we get to say “Yes, life was happening for me even then.” This pair does such an excellent example of illustrating that.

If I was on the opposite end, I’d be like, “How do you do it? What do you mean ‘I’m the master of my reality’? I’m hearing you say that I create everything, but I don’t get that.” That’s just an idea. I’d love to give my experience of that and the way I alchemize my reality as you said it so beautifully. It’s my experience and there’s a lot of literature out there speaking to this very thing, that we’re all vibration. We’re all energy and we’re all sending out a certain frequency into the world that matches with certain other frequencies and repels other certain frequencies, the whole idea of like attracts like. What creates our vibration tends to be the thoughts that we hold. I’m going to ask people to suspend belief, you don’t have to believe me, but we can play around here.

Let’s say we have the same thought over and over again. Maybe it’s like, “I’m unlovable. No one could possibly love me.” There’s a certain vibration that’s related to that thought, and what we keep doing is we send out a certain vibration, a certain energy that mirrors that belief that we’re holding, and there’s a certain feeling in the body associated with it. What is required of us in order to start alchemizing this is to start coming into question with, “What are these thoughts that I’m holding? Are they what I wanted to attract in? How can I be with whatever feelings keep perpetuating that story so I can alchemize it and create a new belief, a new feeling around the belief, and that is what I am transmitting out into the world?” I’ve never described it that way before, but I’m curious where your experience of how you manifest your reality comes in line with that.

For me, the initial first step is about telling the truth and admitting to myself what my actual experiences in my body when there are no distractions, when I’m not reaching out for the partner for comfort, when I’m not reaching out for the food or the social media or anything else, when it’s just me alone in silence, what is my experience of myself? That’s the baseline of where we can start with. That’s where we’re starting from. There might be different moments where there are different experiences but having an objective awareness. They call it meta-cognition in quantum physics, of what my experiences with myself and then being willing to admit that and being willing to face it, being willing to walk into that dark room and turn on a light and notice that that’s what’s going on without getting into the pattern of the self-blame and judgment, which ultimately perpetuates the negative experience. From there, after admitting and noticing what it is that I’m experiencing from that place, there’s an opportunity.

If you imagine in our linear mind the distance from here to where I want to go is five miles, in quantum awareness, the distance can be nothing. We can have the experience of going the five miles without even moving. That’s where it’s feeling what it is that I want to be experiencing right now in instead, and this is where we become the creator of our reality because you don’t have to have the million dollars or the perfect partner or whatever it is in order to have the emotional state that’s associated with that. The end of every goal, every manifestation, and every desire is an emotional state. We’re literally bridging the five-mile distance by experiencing the emotional state now. Following that, what else comes along with already having what we desire is gratitude, feeling the experience of the thing that I want and then having gratitude for it?

You can do that now without doing anything else and making this a practice. With the energy of facing whatever is in that dark room that we didn’t want to face, admitting to ourselves the piece that we didn’t want to admit, that frees up a significant amount of energy that has been utilized and has been used to keep that door shut and not face that. All of that energy, now we have all this energy to play with and you can literally direct it into this new emotional experience you want to have. What happens in your brain, and this is proven through hooking people up to various machines, is you can see that different pathway start lighting up in someone’s brain and you can literally retrain new emotional states and experiences in yourself through this process.

That’s why I imagine that releasing shame is such an essential part of our experience and acknowledging that we’re set up in our culture for this to be challenging work because we exist in a culture that’s very built on there is something that’s very right and there’s something that’s very wrong. There’s a whole bunch of taboo emotions and experiences that you as a socially acceptable person should stay away from, yet ironically, it’s this place where all of our freedom and all of our power resides, which is why vulnerability is such a key aspect to cultivate in this work. To be vulnerable, it’s about saying the thing that that doesn’t feel safe or socially acceptable to say.

It’s about saying the thing that’s like, “This makes me a little nauseous, because this is so behind the veil. This is so real.” Vulnerability to me is the kryptonite of shame. It’s our ability to wear who we are on our sleeve and find our power in it versus feeling like a prisoner of it. It’s an interesting thing being a coach in the coaching industry because in all honesty, there’s a lot of people out there who do not bring good name to being called a coach. Even as a coach who I feel like I’m doing a good job at what I’m doing, there’s a lot out there that it’s not doing an awesome job. When I have conversations with people around why do I hire coaches, I hire someone who is embodying a certain energy, a certain emotional mastery, whether it’s around money or it’s about relationship or it’s about whatever the topic is or the particular thing that I want to tweak to have become more easeful in my life, I hire a coach who already has mastery and is cultivating more mastery in that area because they are transmitting a certain energy. Just through being in their proximity, I titrate with that. I start to pick up on the energy that’s being emitted from them and I start to up-level with them. I’m curious if you want anything to add into that.

Mastering Your Reality: Vulnerability is the kryptonite of shame.

One of the ways that I look for a coach or people and partners as well that I want to be around is I specifically look at what is their relationship to their own shadow. That’s one of the ways that I know if I can trust someone. Do you have a relationship to the parts of yourself that might not be desirable for you? How do you deal with them? Are you ignoring them, or do you look at them? I know that our greatest power resource is tied up in our own shadow material. It’s in the things that we don’t want to look at, and we all have them. We can stop this piece of thinking that people need to be perfect, that people need to have this perfect life in order for them to be your partner or for you to be friends with them or to hire them as a coach, and I’m speaking from my own experience because I used to have this standard of perfection, which is my shadow. It’s this idea that I need to be perfect and I need to have everything all figured it out, I need to always look right, I need to always say the right things and this whole thing and stepping into facing that has been a part of my work, and that is also how I choose the people that I want to be around, just noticing how do they deal with their own undesirable material.

That’s such a beautiful inquiry because it brings me to the question of what does it mean to be a leader, looking at the current state of our political leaders, and how much attachment there is to being right. Imagine if Donald Trump said he was wrong. There’s such been a platform built. With gurus and with leaders especially in America, we can’t even acknowledge the mistakes of our own history, which sets us up for failure. It makes me think of a coaching program that I was in with two of the senior faculty who are up on stage and they were pitching an idea, a project that we were going to do, and there were 100 people in the room in this coaching program who were not feeling this idea. It’s something that the leaders had spent 30 to 40 to 50 minutes going deeply into to get us on board with.

There was this moment where I could see my trust in them waning. Depending upon how they handled this situation, when the whole room feels like pretty much a no, in this moment, are you going to stay attached because your pride as stronger than your willingness to move with what’s true? They wound up listening to the room and taking responsibility and being vulnerable and being humble and shifting the plan. It was in that moment that my respect for them skyrocketed. That’s how amidst my own perfectionistic tendencies, I desire to be a leader. To be a leader does not mean that I’m perfect, but it means that I’m willing as much as possible in real time to take ownership for where I feel like I have “fucked up” and be seen in the messiness of my own process.

To bring it down even in smaller personal relationships, how often is it that we have an idea about something that’s going on with our partner and they tell us, “Actually, it’s this,” but we’re stuck like a dog with a bone that it’s this way and that we’re right when the place where growth happens is when we’re wrong. When we’re willing to let go of the perspective that what we thought was right and look at that something else might actually be true, that’s where we start to close the gaps of our own experience and create more of what we want and specifically in relationships. In romantic relationships, things get so charged and we want to be right all the time. We have this whole story and everything gets built around this idea of, “I’m right about this.” The willingness in a moment to say, “All right, great. I see it differently. I was wrong.” The statement, “I was wrong,” is one of the most empowering places that we can come from in our culture today because there’s so much emphasis on being right and there’s so much abundance and deuce and new experience in being wrong.

It brings me back to the conversation you had around how much energy it frees up. When we’re attached to being right, our entire being goes into preserving my identity that I feel like I am transmitting to the world, who we believe we appear to be to the world is often very different from how the world actually perceives us. One of the main questions that I’ll ask to clients whenever they’re experiencing challenges in their intimate relationship is, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be connected?” This feels like a good place to open up for anyone who wants to hop on the call.

We have several people at this point if you’d like to ask a question or offer a perspective or something that came up for you.

Hi, you both spoke about the idea of emitting a frequency and wanting to emit the right frequency to attract the outcome that you desire. I wonder how you balance doing that with authenticity. How do you acknowledge your actual feeling? Arielle, you said when your partner will say, “You know five ways of shifting,” and you say, “I don’t want to,” there is some value in feeling your feelings. Sometimes it can become an identity with feelings that at some point you need to let them move through you and move on. This is something I have often wondered, reading Abraham Hicks. How do I authentically feel my feelings and yet not fully identify with them and don’t want to spiritually bypass and block out my feelings and try to be in a higher vibration if it’s not authentic?

I forgot what the amount of time is that it’s been said that like it takes for an emotion to move through you, but to me, if an emotion is staying with you for a prolonged period of time, I dare say that that’s not actually you feeling your feeling unobstructed, but instead there’s resistance in there, shame, a story, or whatever judgment that’s not allowing a clear movement of the feeling. One of my teachers, if I’m stuck in something, he’s like, “Take one hour out of your day, it doesn’t even have to be an hour, it could be 30 minutes, and just let yourself go down.” Let yourself immerse into the feeling of it and almost get off on and be turned on by the power of this emotion to bring you into the present moment. I love crying because I know that I’m fully engaged in the present moment. I would say tune in with yourself and feel into, “Am I truly feeling this emotion or am I dipping my toe in but not willing to fully jump into the pool and feel the thing?”

Then there’s another perspective because I hear you. I don’t know if you’re familiar with GIN or the Global Information Network, but one of the first levels of it is ‘feel good now’. If you’re feeling shitty, it can be as simple as focusing your attention on something that allows you to feel good. It’s a dance, because they would say get yourself into a state where your baseline is feeling good. Once you’ve mastered that, start intentionally going into these thoughts and do the work, but it’s a dance and a balance.

My perspective is similar to yours. I hold both perspective simultaneously as well. I’m probably going to lead a little more to the side of the first thing Arielle said, because if something isn’t felt, it just stays. The phrase, “What we resist persists,” is popular, but there’s a real truth to that because when something is actually experienced, it moves. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience but I’m thinking of this time that I was mad at my boyfriend at the time and I was subtly making passive aggressive comments for a few days. All of a sudden one time I blew up and was like, “This is it, this and this and this.” I told him what was going on and it went away. How did it go away in a one-second blow up after I had been holding onto it for so long? It was because I fully allowed myself to feel it. It can feel out of control and it can feel insane when we go into a true deep lead because it’s like a conglomeration or cluster of many different kinds of emotions and when we actually go into it and get off the mental loop, then it goes away.

I get feel good now and it’s something that I do that I think is good to have as something to hold if you feel like you’re always indulging in something. My question would be to go deeper of like, “What am I always indulging in? What is it that I don’t want to feel?” Whatever I’m constantly feeling is the easy place to go. The passive aggressiveness, the snippiness was actually the easy place to go. The explosion of sobbing, trauma and hiding over in the corner like a dog that had been kicked, that was what I didn’t want to feel. That was the real thing that was underneath it and once that moved, then everything else moved. There’s this way of being aware of indulging. There’s a period of time where emotions move very quickly. Stories will stay forever. The psychological looping will stay forever and the real experience of it. Sometimes for me, it’s punching a pillow or letting myself cry or just going into whatever the feeling is or delivering the vulnerable communication that feels uncomfortable and letting it move. Once it’s moved, allowing myself to come out of the trauma state and feel good but not without doing the work first.

Mastering Your Reality: Some people who might tend to be a little more avoidant sometimes actually need a little space on their own to sort out what their experience is.

It’s like a dance. I suppose I was hoping you’d have some magic formula between the two, but it’s just a dance and present moment awareness and knowing I’m feeling something offensive or “Am I overwhelmed and I need to go and take a down spray?” Thanks.

You are welcome. Go ahead.

Would you say the expression is key to that as well then? Being honest with yourself about the fact that you’re holding onto something, and then to really put the key in the door to start to release it to express in some way and to let it boil over and let it go.

Especially when it involves someone else, if you have that opportunity with another human being in the space between two people is a place where things can be resolved much quicker when it can be faced. Everyone’s nervous system calibrates a little bit differently and some people who might tend to be a little more avoidant sometimes actually need a little space on their own to sort out what their experience is and then come to their partners. There are definitely ways to set it up such that the vulnerable communication happens and happens in a way that works for both people. The answer that I would say to that is yes. From what I’ve seen in my own relationships and working with couples, it’s helpful to actually share what’s going on.

The number one fear that most human beings are driven by other than death is the fear of being unlovable. It’s in those moments when we fear that this thing that we fear makes us ugly or unlovable, can we share it? One of my teachers, who does a lot of native American Lakota tradition work, she leads grief rituals, would always say is that grief cannot be fully processed until it’s witnessed in community. That stuck with me. There are rituals done for people to come and grieve and be witnessed. I apply that to any other taboo emotion because grief is taboo. Grief is uncomfortable to be in and being witnessed in. Similar to what Jamie’s saying, there’s this way where we can almost re-instill trauma, like sharing something when we haven’t assimilated it enough to be in our body and the sharing, and this again requires us to attune. This is a process but being able to stay present and express the thing is key.

I want to add one thing to this. The reason why being witnessed in grief or being witnessed in any emotional experience is the key to moving through is because when we are witnessed, and this is where the witness and the person who’s receiving the communication can show up in a big way for their partner or whoever it is they are with, is by simply witnessing them instead of reacting to them. What that does is it gives us a reference point for being able to observe or witness ourselves. Then we go from being the one who is having the experience from also seeing from the higher self-perspective of being the one who is witnessing the one having the experience. Our partner can provide that space for us or community can provide that space for us where we’re like, “I was witnessed with this huge listening and now I can listen to myself a little bit differently in this scenario.”

This has been such a wonderful experience. I’m curious, Jamie, is there anything that you want to wrap up with?

I’m so grateful for this experience and for the audience and for you Arielle and for Robert. Robert’s podcast is amazing and I’m so happy to be on the Tuff Love platform here. My parting words would be we don’t have to be perfect. We just have to be real.

It’s been a total joy and to me this last episode did encapsulate and bring me into my body around all these conversations that we’ve been happy having and how wading into all of these waters have been a big part of what has brought me into the place where I am today. I’m so grateful. Jamie, how can people connect with you if they want to reach out to learn more?

For those who are interested in learning more about my coaching work, you can visit www.ArielleBrown.com. Thank you so much for everyone tuning in this series. Six Vulnerable Conversations does not end here. It will be starting up again soon for season three this time with Robert Kandell and a male colleague of his. It will be Six Vulnerable Conversations Between a Straight Man and A Gay Man. I am so excited to tune in. I can already feel how many places they’re going to go. We’ll see you all soon.

Thank you.

Thank you so much Arielle and Jamie. Thank you for this beautiful series. Thank you for your truth and vulnerability. I’m grateful to you and grateful for our listeners. Thank you so much. For more shows, please visit us at TuffLove.Live. If you feel so inclined, love your loving. Check us out on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. Give us some stars, leave a review. It’s helpful. Thank you so much. Go forth, be true, be vulnerable and take care. I love you.

About Arielle Brown

Arielle is a Relationship Expert & Intimacy Educator. She specializes in helping people to create deeper connection and intimacy their relationships and greater community. In her private coaching work with singles and couples, she helps people create or revitalize relationships that are authentic to the needs, values and desires of each person. Her group facilitation and workshops focus on cultivating deeper levels of intimacy with others through conscious communication, energetic attunement and sensory awareness of the body. Learn more at www.ariellebrown.com.

About Jamie Thompson

Jamie Thompson is an Erotic & Intimate Communication Expert and founder of Relationship Flow State. She specializes in creating a safe space for conscious couples to have open communication while exploring a new edge of passion, depth, and erotic flow. Jamie combines study of the Quantum Field, communication techniques based in Neuroscience, and somatic movement reprogramming with 10 years of coaching experience to help clients harness their erotic intelligence. She also has an online program to help couples and individuals become fluent in the four ‘Erotic Desire Languages’. Mention this podcast to be considered for a complimentary strategy session and receive a discount code for upcoming programs. Email support@jamiethompsoncoaching.com for details.